Sintered cemented carbide articles have been used in both coated and uncoated conditions for various tooling applications, such as cutting tools and wear parts. Increasing sintered cemented carbide resistance to wear and other failure modes including thermal fatigue, fracture and chipping, remains an intense area of research and development. To that end, significant resources have been assigned to the development of wear resistant refractory coatings for cutting tools. TiC, TiCN, TiOCN, TiN and Al2O3, for example, have been applied to cemented carbides by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) as well as physical vapor deposition (PVD).
Moreover, properties of the underlying cemented carbide substrates have been investigated. Cutting tool manufacturers have examined compositional changes to cemented carbide bodies and the resulting effects on cemented carbide properties including, but not limited to, hardness, wear resistance, thermal deformation resistance, toughness and density. Enhancement of one cemented carbide property, however, often results in the concomitant deterioration of another cemented carbide property. For example, increasing cemented carbide deformation resistance can result in decreased toughness and thermal conductivity. Nevertheless, improvements to cemented carbide bodies are necessary to meet the evolving demands of metal working applications, and a careful balance between competing properties is required when making compositional changes to cemented carbide bodies in efforts to provide cutting tools with improved performance.